P2Pvalue at Internet, Politics, and Policy (IPP) conference

The Barcelona team are presenting “Mapping the common based peer production: A crowd-sourcing experiment”

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is an emerging and innovative model of collaborative production. It usually takes place through a digital platform (Benkler 2006). It is characterized by peer to peer relationships, in contrast to the traditionally hierarchical command and contractual relationships, and with limited mercantile exchange. It results in the (generally) open access provision of commons resources (P2Pvalue, 2014).

Some well-known examples are Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects and Wikipedia. From those first generation of cases, there has recently been an expansion of CBPP to other areas of activity, such as citizen science, open product design, management of common spaces and open data sources. The paper explains the criteria to mapthis emerging model of collaborative production.

The map of CBPP cases is based on web observation, web scripts, interviews to experts (to have an initial set of areas of activity of CBPP), a survey between CBPP cases to an ulterior classification and analysis of 302cases. The result is the biggest database of CBPP cases, the data from the CBPP cases include area of activity, main purpose of the case, language, country, relationship with the digital environment (from digitally based to digitally supported), type of resulting resource, type of license and software and more of 150 variables.

To map this diversity of cases is abig methodological challenge with some constraints such as the absence of previous CBPP database and other features of this phenomena that we explain in the following document.

The Paris team are presenting “Regulating Distributed Peer-Production Infrastructures”

Crowdsourcing designates a production process distributed among a large number of peers, which all contribute with their own resources to a common goal. The process can be either centralized, i.e. when the contributions of a disparate group of peers are coordinated through one central authority, or decentralized, i.e. when peers coordinate themselves in a distributed manner, without relying on any centralized authority.

This paper targets a specific kind of online peer-production platforms – so-called commons based production platforms (Benkler, 2006) – which implement decentralization both at the level of the technical infrastructure (i.e. with a decentralized, peer-to-peer architecture) and at the governance level (i.e. ownership of both the platform and the output of production is distributed or shared in common among all peers, instead of being controlled by a central entity).

It will focus, in particular, on three distributed peer-production platforms: Kune, a federated platform for community management and collaborative production; Twister, a decentralized peer-to-peer micro-blogging platform; and Globaleaks, an anonymous, censorship-resistant, distributed whistle-blowing platform.